Movie review: City of Ghosts’ profiles heroes of resistance

Wednesday

Jul 19, 2017 at 4:11 PM

Al Alexander More Content now

Everyone has their breaking point. For the good people of Raqqa, it was the arrest and torture of 15 children by the soulless regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. That was in 2012 in the midst of the Arab Spring, when the repressed of the Middle East believed freedom would finally be theirs. But instead of liberty, as Matthew Heineman’s wrenching documentary “City of Ghosts” reminds, the people of “the simple, isolated city of Raqqa” received only bullets fired randomly at protesters by Assad’s goons. Defeated, the demoralized citizenry became suddenly susceptible to the likes of the Islamic State, which overran the city in July 2014, declaring a caliphate and cutting off all contact to the outside world.

“City of Ghosts” unflinchingly reveals the ensuing heartache through riveting first-person accounts by the brave citizen journalists of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, or RBSS. Risking not only their own lives, but those of their families, these brave men brazenly use cell phones and social media to tell the world of the daily atrocities committed by ISIS in their beloved city. If anyone can relate it’s Heineman, who also risks life and limb by entering this chaotic war zone — probing camera in hand — to profile these heroes of the resistance.

Sticking his neck out is nothing new for Heineman, who previously cheated death by hanging with a similar group of martyrs in the Oscar-nominated “Cartel Land,” which chronicled the work of Mexican vigilantes gathering to battle drug czars, who like ISIS, took over their cities and ruled with an agenda of murder and fear.

Heineman opens his follow-up powerfully with a collage of photos — all of them graphic — of the horrors RBSS clandestinely recorded of ISIS militants murdering innocents in the streets — in broad daylight. It’s a proper warmup for the pain and misery we’re about to watch unfold, as we get to know a half-dozen RBSS volunteers, all of whom have paid a heavy price for taking a stand against their oppressors. Not only have they been driven from their homes, and in some cases from their country to exile in Turkey and Germany, two — siblings Hamoud and Hassan — have lost family members, murdered by ISIS in hopes of sending a message that RBSS’s truth-telling will not be tolerated.

Yet they, like their colleagues, forge on, honoring the deaths of their loved ones by doubling down on their determination to make the world see what ISIS doesn’t want it to see. You admire their resolve, but you also admire them as people, empathizing with their plight, as circumstances drive them farther and farther away from the city they love. Many of them wind up as distant as Germany, where we follow them after what they thought was their safe haven in Gaziantep, Turkey, proves just as dangerous as walking the streets of Raqqa.

Like Liam Neeson in the “Taken” movies, ISIS likes to remind its enemies that it has a particular set of skills it will use to find you, and when it does, kill you. And RBSS learns they’re not kidding, as the group’s founder, Naji Jerf, suddenly winds up dead in the streets of Gaziantep, the victim of a murder that sends shivers. But will Germany be any safer? Not only is assassination still a real possibility, as threatening ISIS missives promise, but there’s also the Islamophobes we see taking to the streets of Berlin demanding that the flux of Middle Eastern refugees be sent home immediately.

In essence, the members or RBSS become men — and in only a few cases, women — without a home or country. It’s heartbreaking to watch, and will surely cause you to question President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from Syria, where the threat of death is a constant companion. Perhaps films like “City of Ghosts” will help change minds, as it exposes the no-win situation Syrians are faced with on a daily basis. More than that, what Heineman does is put a human face on the nightly reports of carnage. You really grow to like and admire the members of RBSS and the invaluable work they do.

Without them, particularly the “reporters” on the front lines who — like amateur James Bonds — use cloak-and-dagger methods to smuggle out their footage, how would the world know the levels of depravity ISIS will sink in the name of propaganda. Most harrowing, is the footage we see of ISIS recruiting children, teaching kids as young as 8 and 9 to kill, and in one particularly wrenching sequence, execute “criminals” by shooting them in the back of the head.

Monster is too nice a word for these charlatans claiming to “serve” Allah. But it’s comforting to know that groups like RBSS are out there proving — like its motto — that the pen is mightier than the sword. It’s a point that couldn’t be more timely or poignant in a frightening environment where the leader of the free world is determined to diminish — if not wipe out — the essentiality of a free and unfettered press. Watching the men of RBSS only galvanizes your desire to fight back, and more importantly, stop taking our own freedoms for granted.

“City of Ghosts”A documentary by Matthew Heineman featuring members of the citizen journalists group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently. (R for disturbing violent content and for some language.) Grade: A-